Preview: Reading 2011

Last year I had a list of books that I wanted to choose from, leaving room. And you might remember it from my twitter background.

I only managed 19 books and that is counting in Halberstam’s Best & the Brightest and Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest which I both didn’t finish. Nothing close to Dave Fleet’s 31 or Timo’s 42. But it’s ok. It turns out that reading comes really hard after days with a toddler and I just had a lot of stuff on my mind at times added in the new flat, moving in etc. I really wanted to work on Infinite Jest and the Halberstam. Best & the Brightest gives great insight into how the Vietnam War came into existence and I might continue reading it on my phone but for now it’s just too long. And the Infinite Jest is … well, I have no trouble reading it. The style is actually quite nice (I am a firm believer that Ulysees would be a great book for me), it’s just not very entertaining. And at 1000+ pages I frankly have other choices. I just kept going back to them, since Julian Smith put an interesting argument out there, namely to question whether what we consume is challenging us or dulling us out? I thought that I had to finish the Jest before being allowed a two day read-through crime novel. Turns out that I am not wound that way. I often read 4-5 books at the same time and confess to be happier with reading more shorter books than 1 long book, even if that one book will seem more gratifying because it’s “better literature”. As long as I am reading at all, I am ok.

There will be not Twitter background with books this year I think. In the new flat we finally real book shelves again, so no need for an extra “read this year”-shelf.
(actually we have two of these, one for fiction, one for non-fiction, such geeks we are)

But what you have been waiting for, here is the tentative list for 2011:

Joe Jaffe – Flip the Funnel (Kindle for iPhone)+

PLI/Abby Marks Beale – 10 Days to faster Reading

Paul Auster – Oracle Night (*)

Wallace Stegner – Crossing to Safety (*)

Georg Franck – Die Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit

Thomas Klupp – Paradiso

Nick Hornby – Juliet Naked

Siri Hustvest – Enchantment of Lily Dahl

Chris Brogan/Julien Smith – Trust Agents

Peter Carey – My life as a fake

Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*

Jack Falla – Home Ice

Dan Tapscott – Wikinomics

Minette Walters – The Breaker

Ken Follett – Pillars of the Earth

O’Reilly – Your Brain: The Missing Manual

Charles Frazier – Thirteen Moons

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird (*)

Hanif Kureishi – The Buddha of Suburbia

John Douglas – Inside the Mind of BTK+

C. C. Chapman – Content Rules+

Tony Hsieh – Delivering Happyness

Richard Powers – Generosity

Audrey Niffenegger – Her Fearful Symmetry

Charles Bukowski – Ham on Rye

Ken Auletta – Googled+

Avinash Kaushik – Google Analytics an Hour a Day

Chip & Dan Heath – Switch

As you can see, I am reading four non-fiction books at the moment, well, that can’t be good 😉 Let me know what you think, happy New Year.